Latitude

Back to the globe. Spin it and watch: everything moves except two points, one at the top and one at the bottom. These are the North Pole and the South Pole. Halfway between them is the Equator.

Imagine you stand on the Equator and travel towards one of the poles. Your distance from the Equator grows. Latitude measures this distance from the Equator.

At any point on the way, you can draw an imaginary line running east and west, parallel to the Equator. Such a line is called a parallel of latitude, and it makes a full circle round the Earth. An easy way to remember it: latitude lines lie flat, across the globe.

On the globe you can see that the largest circle is the Equator. The parallels of latitude get smaller as you move north or south, and at the poles themselves the circle shrinks to a single point.

Latitudes are measured in degrees. The Equator is latitude 0°, and the two poles are 90° north and 90° south, written 90°N and 90°S. So latitude runs from 0 in the middle to 90 at each end, and the letter N or S tells you which half of the world you are in.

Latitude is linked to climate.

• Around the Equator the climate is generally hot, called torrid.
• As you travel away from the Equator towards a pole (as your latitude increases), the climate becomes milder, called temperate.
• Close to the North or South Pole it grows cold, called frigid.

So if you know a place's latitude, you can already guess something about its weather.